I agree Claude got confused, but I don’t see how this relates to the taboo around assigning Iran agency?
Like, maybe you’re pointing to “Claude wanted to say ‘Iran bad’”. Fair enough, I could see that being part of why it wrote this sentence, but not relevant to the agency thing.
Here’s the key part of the convo, abridged:
Ben: “OK so the delay in attacking Iran was partly lining up offensive capability but partly positioning defenses against this sort of deterrent measure; and insofar as the latter contributed to a meaningful delay that let the regime crack down on protestors it was effective deterrence (though possibly not enough to save the regime).”
Claude: “The US buildup — the carrier groups, the public rhetoric — probably itself contributed to the regime’s ability to crack down”
Ben: “I see no evidence for that”
Claude: ”...The rally-around-the-flag model is a reasonable prior for how populations usually respond to external threats, but I was applying it as a generic template rather than checking whether it fit this specific case.… So the simpler version of the delay story is probably just: the US needed time to position defenses, Iran used that time to kill protestors, and that’s it. No need for a clever rally-around-the-flag mechanism to explain the crackdown — raw state violence was apparently sufficient on its own. ”
To me, the response you object to feels like it’s muddled in a couple ways:
Saying “the delay story” when the primary topic at hand isn’t the cause of the delay, it’s the effect of US intervention.
“raw state violence” feels like a weird thing to cite as an explanation of the crackdown. Being generous, Claude’s gesturing at something like: the Iranian state had the capacity & willingness to crack down on the populace independent of the excuse of incoming US attacks. But capacity and willingness are pretty different from “raw state violence”.
But this is all about the Iranian crackdown on domestic protestors, not whether they targeted civilians abroad. So I don’t see how it relates to your claim about models not assigning the US agency, or saying Iran was targeting civilians.
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[reading further]
OK, Claude generates the hypothesis that these are related bc it’s denying Iran’s strategic rationality. That does feel relevant to both of those, but not very relevant to the specific aspect of protest crackdowns that Claude is looking at?
Like… I guess you could interpret Claude saying “raw state violence” as meaning “the Iranian state are just assholes for no reason”. OTOH, in that sentence I think Claude has sort of confused itself into thinking its original claim which it now has to repudiate is that “Iran cracked down because of a rally effect”, which doesn’t really make sense? So to me it feels like motivated reasoning to impose the “denying Iran agency” frame.
(Also, TBH, I think Claude is clearly right that there’s some marginal effect where “the US is targeting us soon” enables the regime to crack down more than it would normally. “Protestors & reformers are weakening the state as pawns or allies of our mortal enemy” is just one of those convenient narratives. Not sure it mattered much in this case, though.)
Nit: Is it actually true that physics & mathematics don’t imply consciousness? I grant that their ontologies (as we understand them) don’t have a natural “slot” for consciousness. But consciousness arises somehow. Presumably if we were good enough at physics or math, we could find the laws for when and how it arises. And those laws would be discoverable by non-conscious beings too.